Posts Tagged ‘fractional reserve banking’

AS THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY SUGGESTS, A LOAN IS AN EXCHANGE OF WEALTH FOR INCOME. Like everything else in a free market (imagine happier days of yore), it is a voluntary trade. Contrary to the endemic language of victimization, both parties regard themselves as gaining thereby, or else they would not enter into the transaction.

In a loan, one party is the borrower and the other is the lender. Mechanically, it is very simple. The lender gives the borrower money and the borrower agrees to pay interest on the outstanding balance and to repay the principle. As with many principles in economics, one can shed light on a trade by looking back in history to a time before the trade existed and considering how the trade developed.

It is part of the nature of being a human that one is born unable to work, living on the surplus produced by one’s parents. One grows up and then one can work for a time. And then one becomes old and infirm, living but not able to work. If one wishes not to starve to death in old age, one can have lots of children and hope that they will care for their parents in their old age. Or, one can produce more than one consumes and hoard the difference.

One discovers that certain goods are better for hoarding than others. Beyond a little food for the next winter season, one cannot hoard very much. One of the uses of the monetary commodity is to carry value over time. So one uses a part of one’s weekly income to buy, for example, silver. And over the years, one accumulates a pile of silver. Then, when one is no longer able to work, one can sell the silver a little at a time to buy food, clothing, fuel, etc.

Like direct barter trade, this is inefficient. And there is the risk of outliving one’s hoard. So at some point, a long time ago, they discovered lending. Lending makes possible the concept of saving, as distinct from hoarding. It is as significant a change as when people discovered money and solved the problem of “coincidence of wants”. This is for the same reason: direct exchange is replaced by indirect exchange and thereby made much more efficient.

With this new innovation, one can lend one’s silver hoard in old age and get an income from the interest payments. One can budget to live on the interest, with no risk of running out of money. That is, one can exchange one’s wealth for income.

If there is a lender, there must also be a borrower or there is no trade. Who is the borrower? He is typically someone young, who has an income and an opportunity to grow his income. But the opportunity—for example, to build his own shop—requires capital that he does not have and does not want to spend half his working years accumulating. The trade is therefore mutually beneficial. Neither is “exploiting” the other, and neither is a victim. Both gain from the deal, or else they would not agree to it. The lender needs the income and the borrower needs the wealth. They agree on an interest rate, a term, and an amortization schedule and the deal is consummated.

I want to emphasize that we are still contemplating the world long before the advent of the bank. There is still the problem of “coincidence of wants” with regard to lending; the old man with the hoard must somehow come across the young man with the income and the opportunity. The young man must have a need for an amount equal to what the old man wants to lend (or an amount much smaller so that the old man can lend the remainder to another young man). The old man cannot diversify easily, and therefore his credit risk is unduly concentrated in the one young man’s business. And bid-ask spreads on interest rates are very wide, and thus whichever party needs the other more urgently (typically the borrower) is at a large disadvantage.

Of course the very next innovation that they discovered is that one need not hoard silver one’s whole career and offer to lend it only when one retires. One can lend even while one is working to earn interest and let it compound. This innovation lead to the creation of banks.

But before we get to the bank, I want to drill a little more deeply into the structure of money and credit that develops.

Before the loan, we had only money (i.e. specie). After the loan, we have a more complex structure. The lender has a paper asset; he is the creditor of the young man and his business who must pay him specie in the future. But the lender does not have the money any more. The borrower has the money, but only temporarily. He will typically spend the money. In our example, he will hire the various laborers to clear a plot of land, build a building and he will buy tools and inventory.

What will those laborers and vendors do with the money? Likely they will keep some of it, spend some of it… and lend some of it. That’s right. The proceeds that come from what began as a loan from someone’s hoard have been disbursed into the economy and eventually land in the hands of someone who lends them again! The “same” money is being lent again!

And what will the next borrower do with it? Spend it. And what will those who earn it do? Spend some, keep some, and lend some. Again.

There is an expansion of credit! There is no particular limit to how far it can expand. In fact, it will develop iteratively into the same topology (mathematical structure) as one observes with fractional reserve banking under a proper, unadulterated gold standard!

Without banks, there are two concepts that are not applicable yet. First is “reserve ratio”. Each person is free to lend up to 100% of his money if he wishes, though most people would not do that in most circumstances.

And second is duration mismatch. Since each lender is lending his own money, by definition and by nature he is lending it for precisely as long as he means to. And if he makes a mistake, only he will bear the consequences. If one lends for 10 years duration, and a year later one realizes that one needs the money, one must go to the market to try to find someone who will buy the loan. And then discover the other side of that large bid-ask spread, as one may take a loss doing this.

Now, let’s fast forward to the advent of the investment bank. Like everyone else in the free market, the bank must do something to add value or else it will not find willing trading partners. What does the bank do?

As I hinted above, the bank is the market maker. The market maker narrows the bid-ask spread, which benefits everyone. The bank does this by standardizing loans into bonds, and the bank stands ready to buy or sell such bonds. The bank also aggregates bonds across multiple lenders and across multiple borrowers. This solves the problem of excessive credit risk concentration, coincidence of wants (i.e. size matching), and saves both lenders and borrowers enormous amounts of time. And of course if either needs to get out of a deal when circumstances change, the bank makes a liquid market.

The bank must be careful to protect its own solvency in case of credit risk greater than it assumed. This is the reason for keeping some of its capital in reserve! If the bank lent 100% of its funds, then it would be bankrupt if any loan ever defaulted.

What the bank must not do, what it has no right to do, is lend its depositors’ funds for longer than they expressly intended. If a depositor wants to lend for 5 years, it is not the right of the bank to lend that depositor’s money for ten! The bank has no right to declare, “well, we have a reserve ratio greater than our estimated credit risk and therefore we are safe to borrow short from our depositors to lend long”

Not only has the bank no way to know what reserve ratio will be proof against a run on the bank, but it is inevitable that a run will occur. This is because the depositors think they will be getting their money back, but the bank is concealing the fact that they won’t behind an opaque balance sheet and a large operation. So, sooner or later, depositors need their money for something and the bank cannot honor its obligations. So the bank must sell bonds in quantity. If other banks are in the same situation, the bond market suddenly goes “no bid”.

The bank has no legal right and no moral right to lend a demand deposit or to lend a time deposit for one day longer than its duration. And even then, the bank has no mathematical expectation that it can get away with it forever.

Like every other actor in the market (and more broadly, in civilization) the bank adds enormous value to everyone it transacts with, provided it acts honestly. If a bank chooses to act dishonestly (or there is a central bank that centrally plans money, credit, interest, and discount and forces all banks to play dirty) then it can destroy value rather than creating it.

Unfortunately, in 2012 the world is in this sorry state. It is not the nature of banks or banking per se, it is not the nature of borrowing and lending per se, it is not the nature of fractional reserves per se. It is duration mismatch, central planning, counterfeit credit, buyers of last/only resort, falling interest rates, and a lack of any extinguisher of debt that are the causes of our monetary ills.

As many of you old-timers know, my colleagues and I have been working to expose the fraud of the Federal Reserve System for many decades, not only in our movie, Fiat Empire featuring Ron Paul, but at places like the MIND-X and The Daily Bell.

When I first invited artificial intelligence enthusiasts at the MIND-X to read The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin many apologists, who are either naive or who live off the fiat-currency system, fought me and argued for at least ten years. Given that this subject is now in the mainstream every day: I hope these people will now acknowledge that the issue has merit and the Federal Reserve – the FED – is an instrument of unjust enrichment.

As Ron Paul says – and many others now acknowledge – it’s become common knowledge that the Fed “prints money out of thin air” and this activity inflates the money supply, thus causing the hidden tax of “inflation” and a destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power. It is thus the Federal Reserve System that is the CAUSE OF THE CURRENT GREAT RECESSION, THE 2008 FINANCIAL MELTDOWN, THE LINGERING UNEMPLOYMENT and THE MULTI-TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICITS we are now experiencing.

That bit of housekeeping done, allow me to say further: the Federal Reserve’s MONETIZING of debt – now known by the euphemism of QUANTITATIVE EASING – and its practice of FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING have allowed an elite class of people to emerge, a class that has exploited the American middle class, if not driven many of them into bankruptcy. This has happened because the major corporations – majority-owned by this class – have sought ever bigger profits provided by exploiting cheap foreign labor and military services. The American Middle Class is justifiably getting REALLY pissed-off.

GLOBAL FRAUD:

The banking class – and the corporations that do business with this class – have reconfigured U.S. laws to enable them to facilitate massive mergers and acquisitions over the past several decades. This consolidation took massive financing, so where did the money come from? It came from the Federal Reserve Member Banks as loans driven by fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. In other words, the major banks created trillions out of thin air and gave it to their cronies in corporate America in exchange for stock in the consolidated multinational corporations.

These multinational corporations, having driven most of their “free market” competition out of business (as a result of their access to fiat money) were now in a position to fund the campaigns of many congressmen. In exchange for campaign finances, many congressmen were behooved to relax anti-trust laws and provide all manner of special privileges. Such resulted in, for instance, the “financial services” industry whereby banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies were able to commingle their business plans to maximize market share and profits. The conflicts of interest that were created as a result caused the global financial meltdown which started in 2008 and proceeds more covertly to this day.

Thus, the fight over gold and silver as media of exchange is about more than mere money, let alone making money. For it is a fight with only two possible outcomes: either control of their own lives by the people themselves, or control of the people and their lives by political and economic elitists. – Dr. Edwin Vieira

USUALLY, WHEN CONSPIRACY AND MONEY ARE MENTIONED IN THE SAME SENTENCE most people’s brains automatically shut off at the thought of talking repitles or cloaked figures in dark rooms. While I do not discount talking reptiles, haven’t you seen Gieco’s talking gekko on television, but this broad, deep and complicated article is for those whose brains have not been devoured or turned to mush by conspiring reptiles and will objectively address the fiat legal tender currency and fractional reserve banking conspiracy.

But this conspiracy is far worse than cloaked figures in dark rooms because this is a conspiracy of economics. But what is exciting is that some of the fundamental tectonic plates of economics have begun shifting and what has appeared to the perceptive is actionable, peaceful and extermely effective strategies to harness the ecnomics in favor of the average person’s freedom.

He who has the gold makes the rules MONEY, ILLUSIONS AND CURRENCY

Currency is usually the most widely used medium of exchange in economic transactions. Currency can be composed of either money, money substitutes or illusions. The only significant element for money is that it must be a tangible asset and throughout history there has been a wide range of substances that functioned as money ranging from seashells to salt and giant stones to the King and Queen of commodities; gold or silver.

Money substitutes are merely certificates for money and a common form were silver or gold certificates that operated as currency in various countries and formed the foundation for terms like Dollar, Franc, Mark, Pound, etc. that have since been redefined as they have become illusions.

Illusions are figments of people’s imagination that, as long as they are accepted, maintain some amount of purchasing power. Illusions are usually represented as ephemeral entries in databases or can take corporeal form as little colored coupons like the Federal Reserve Note Dollar, Euro, Yen, etc. Illusions have no intrinsic value and can become worthless. Their only value is in the mass delusion of people’s imagination that they represent real value.

The main cause of the 2008 financial crisis was the loss of faith in debt denominated in illusions. The real and inevitable financial and economic crisis, which will make 2008 look like a calm Sunday picnic, will be the evaporation of trust in the prima donna fiat legal tender currency illusion and world reserve currency the Federal Reserve Note Dollar, through hyperinflation.

Fed chief Ben Bernanke told the financial crisis inquiry commission today: If the crisis has a single lesson, it is that the too-big-to-fail problem must be solved. Too-big-to-fail financial institutions were both a source… of the crisis and among the primary impediments to policymakers’ efforts to contain it…

That’s funny, given that Bernanke has been one of the biggest defenders of the too big to fail banks, arguing strenuously against breaking them up, throwing trillions of dollars their way, and begging the banks to play nice with one hand, while patting them on the back with the other hand and giving them a big wink. And Christina Romer – Obama’s outgoing chief economist and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers – said in her outgoing speech yesterday, as summarized by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post: “She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.”

Many have tried to explain to the neoclassical economists running the show exactly how bad the economic collapse would be, why it was so bad, and how to mount an adequate response to fix things. But Bernanke, Romer and the rest of the gang ignored them.

Who Knew?As I pointed out in March, Greenspan’s big defense is that the financial crisis was caused by a “once-in-a-century” event. Forget about the fact that the “once-in-a-century event” couldn’t have happened if Greenspan’s Fed hadn’t:

• Turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud
• Acted as cheerleader in chief for unregulated use of derivatives at least as far back as 1999 (see this and this)
• And for subprime loans
• Allowed the giant banks to grow into mega-banks. For example, Citigroup’s former chief executive says that when Citigroup was formed in 1998 out of the merger of banking and insurance giants, Greenspan told him, “I have nothing against size. It doesn’t bother me at all”
• Argued that economists had conquered the business cycle, and that modern, technologically advanced financial markets are best left to police themselves
• Preached that a new bubble be blown every time the last one bursts
• Kept interest rates too low
• And did alot of other hinky things

More importantly, as Nassim Taleb repeatedly points out, financial experts who don’t plan for rare events are like pilots who don’t know about storms. There are storms out there, Taleb says, and any pilot who doesn’t know how to deal with storms shouldn’t be flying. Similarly, no one should be in a position of financial leadership if they don’t know about – and plan for – the infrequent event:

High Priests Shake their Magic Wands Even HarderAs Australian economist Steve Keen wrote last week, mainstream economists have been acting like religious fundamentalists, rather than scientists:

Bernanke’s failure to realize this: it’s a failing that he shares in common with the vast majority of economists. His problem is the theory he learnt in high school and university that he thought was simply “economics”—as if it was the only way one could think about how the economy operated. In reality, it was “Neoclassical economics”, which is just one of the many schools of thought within economics. In the same way that Christianity is not the only religion in the world, there are other schools of thought in economics. And just as different religions have different beliefs, so too do schools of thought within economics—only economists tend to call their beliefs “assumptions” because this sounds more scientific than “beliefs”.

The following are some snippets from the most recent issue of the International Forecaster. For the full 29 page issue, please see subscription information below.

US MARKETS

Since hyperinflation is clearly in our future, let’s talk about what inflation really is, what causes it, what the different degrees or levels of inflation are, and what it takes to put a stop to inflation?

By modern definitions, inflation is basically an overall increase in the prices charged for goods and services in a particular economy over time. This is a pretty simple concept, but there is some real confusion as to what the root cause of inflation is. It does not come from people willy-nilly charging more for their goods and services. People can raise prices all they like, but if there is not enough money and credit available to purchase their goods and services at the prices they are charging, they will eventually have to either lower their prices, or expect to make far fewer sales.

What you have witnessed for the past two years is the above concept in overdrive, especially in the real estate and automobile markets, as the supply of money and credit has greatly contracted for all but the anointed Illuminist institutions that are parking their profits and bailout money at interest with the Fed for fear that they might lend it out to a zombie financial institution or business corporation and never get it back. As their money is sidelined with the Fed to sterilize it (i.e. to keep it from stoking inflation) the smaller fry who depend on them for their supply of financial capital are being allowed to die of money and credit starvation so the anointed can purchase the most valuable parts of their financial carcasses at pennies on the dollar via bankruptcy auctions and fire-sales in a blatant attempt to eliminate their competition and consolidate their power. This deflationary contraction in the supply of money and credit due to the exposed loan, mortgage and derivative fraud is a strong undertow to our economy which threatens to drag it out to sea until it runs out of air and drowns. The Fed must therefore inflate and swim for shore, or die. And inflate they will. We can absolutely guarantee it. Obama will go down in history as the King of Stagflation, as he joins forces with the inimitable Gordon Brown, the King of Fire-Sale Gold.

On a microeconomic scale, prices for specific goods and services are usually set by supply and demand (that, of course, would be in a free economy which we no longer have, so manipulation becomes an input for pricing specific goods and services in our economy, and is sometimes even the main input, as with gold and silver prices). However, the microeconomic factors which determine prices for goods and services are by far trumped by the macroeconomic factors of supply and demand. The supply side on a macroeconomic scale is determined by the amount of goods and services that are produced for sale in the overall economy. The demand side on a macroeconomic scale is the amount of money and credit available to the overall economy with which those goods and services can be purchased, or expressed another way, the amount of money and credit that is available to chase after those goods and services.

This is why the price of gold and silver must eventually skyrocket. The microeconomic supply, demand and manipulation factors which currently have sway over gold and silver prices will eventually be trumped by the macroeconomic factors, namely, a profligate increase in the supply of money and credit to unheard of levels which will drive prices up across the board. The Fed cannot suppress the price of all goods and services as it rampantly expands the supply of money and credit, and can only influence a chosen few, such as gold and silver, which are suppressed because they are the canaries in the coal mine. When everything else gets more expensive, and as fiat currencies are shown to be the “worthless paper” they really are, gold and silver will become the only real safe-havens from the resulting inflation and financial deterioration. That will then generate a demand for precious metals that is so great, it will drive the price of gold and silver up until they catch up with the overall supply of money and credit, and there is nothing the Fed can do to stop it, short of pulling the plug on money and credit and destroying our economy, along with the privately owned Fed itself and its Illuminist cronies with it. This eventual destruction is planned to be sure, in order to pave the way for a one world Orwellian police state. The trick for the Illuminists is how to get out of their paper assets and convert them to real assets on the cheap before pulling the plug on money and credit. The problem is that as they bail out of paper, and into tangible assets, along with other foreign creditor nations anxious to trade their “worthless paper” in for things of real value, their bailing activities will drive inflation, and the price of gold, silver and other tangible assets, to unheard of levels, thereby dramatically decreasing the amount of tangible assets that they can absorb with their dollar reserves and their sales proceeds from the dumping of paper assets. The US and its creditors will be competing with one another in the race to dump dollar-denominated paper assets in exchange for precious metals, commodities, real estate, factories and equipment and other tangible assets, as well as shares in companies which own such assets, including shares in gold and silver producers.

The obvious answer is, of course, that they can’t pull this off on the cheap, and they will use the resulting hyperinflation to wreck the rest of the economy while they are desperately attempting to bail out of dollar-denominated paper assets behind everyone’s backs, as part of their Big Sting Two criminal enterprise. They will attempt to accomplish this insider trading scam in secret through unregulated dark pools of liquidity such as Project Turquoise and Baikal, as well as through the unregulated gambling casino which some dare to call the OTC derivatives market. They will use their sales proceeds to buy all the real, tangible assets they can get their hands on and leave everyone else holding a bag full of “worthless paper,” aka Federal Reserve notes, US Treasury bonds and GSE bonds. But the amount of “worthless paper” is so great, and there are so many substantial players who will be trying to do the same thing, that market chaos will result, and the paper assets will deteriorate, and the price of tangible assets will simultaneously appreciate, at a rate that leaves everyone breathless. Truly, this will be a situation where he who loses the least, and he who buys gold and silver and their related shares early on, are the ultimate winners. The biggest losers will be those who fail to take physical delivery of their precious metals, such as gold and silver ETF shareholders and holders of mint certificates, who will be thoroughly Madoff’d, as well as holders of any leveraged gold and silver futures positions who will be wiped out by manipulations before the final run-up, thus losing all their investment capital.

The elitist oligarchs who run America, Canada and Western Europe and their privately owned central banks own tens of thousands of tons of gold already, and will seek to take the proceeds from the sale of their paper assets and use them to increase their gold holdings in an attempt to maintain monetary dominance over major players like China and Russia, who will also attempt to add to their holdings by many thousands of tons. There is only so much gold to go around, and when all the big players become gold bugs themselves, gold, and also silver, will go ballistic. They want the gold mine (literally), while you get the shaft. That is, has been, and always will be, “The Plan.” Bernanke and Geithner are now Obama’s twin Tattoo’s, with our apologies to the producers of “Fantasy Island,” a show which has become a perfect metaphor for what the US economy with its so-called “Green Shoots” has become. De plan, boss, de plan. De plan indeed.

On a technical macroeconomic basis, an economy suffers from inflation when the amount of its total money and credit available over a period of time (the demand) grows at a rate in excess of the rate of growth in its total value of goods and services produced over that period of time (the supply), which valuation is based on price levels in effect at the beginning of that period of time. In more simple terms, inflation occurs when the rate of expansion of the supply of money and credit exceeds the rate of expansion in the production of goods and services. In fact, in the past when we still had a modicum of integrity in measuring economic statistics, inflation was defined as an increase in the supply of money and credit, period. Higher prices were simply a symptom of inflation, not a definition of inflation. The supply of money and credit was what was inflated, not the prices of goods and services, which simply rose as a direct outcome of the inflated supply of money and credit.

Since central banks are currently in control of the supply of money and credit in most modern economies, it is the bankster-gangsters who are, ergo, solely responsible for any overall increases in inflation, and that goes double for any large increases.

In the US, the privately owned Fed plays the role of our central bank, and it presides over our nefarious banking system, which is a fiat-money, debt-based, European form of fractional reserve banking that once powered the British mercantilist system. All major US inflationary issues and debacles can therefore be squarely placed at the doorsteps of the Fed, and of our Treasury Department, which is little more than a doormat for the Fed, which together with Wall Street, runs a revolving door with the Treasury. In fact, our current Treasury Secretary is the former President of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. So much for checks and balances and avoidance of conflicts of interest.

We now have the Fed increasing total money and credit (M3) at a rate of 18% while our GDP is contracting at a rate of minus 6%. That is a 24% differential, and that means that the amount of goods and services being produced has an ever-growing supply of money chasing after it, money and credit that is growing at a pace that is 24% more than the pace at which goods and services are growing. Based on all the foregoing, we’ll give you three guesses as to what the outcome will be somewhere down the road when the Fed’s ever-burgeoning money blob starts chasing after a shrinking supply of goods and services.

Inflation comes in basically three varieties. Normal inflation, which is basically harmless, is a temporary increase in prices caused by an increase in the supply of money and credit by the central bank which is intended to precisely anticipate the rate of growth in the production of goods and services. You have more money and credit, but you also have more goods and services being produced. The temporary bout of minimal inflation caused by the anticipatory increase in the supply of money and credit is offset or absorbed by the greater pile of goods and services that is accumulating, so prices remain stable over time. This is obviously not an exact science, so there are some up-ticks if the money supply grows a little too fast, but over time this can be corrected. It is best to overshoot a little so as not to start an economic contraction, which, if left unchecked, could lead to a recession or depression.

The next type of inflation we would characterize as elevated inflation. This is what we have currently at a rate of about 10% and growing. This type of inflation results where the central bank consistently grows money and credit at a rate far in excess of the rate of growth in the production of goods and services, measured in terms of GDP growth, over an extended period of time. What the Illuminati have done for over 20 years now, was to have the Fed, which they privately own, raise the level of growth in the supply of money and credit to ludicrous levels, while they simultaneously ordered their lackeys at the BLS to lie about the rate of the resulting inflation by using hedonics (statistical manipulations) that were intended to greatly understate inflation. As a result, when real GDP was calculated, the GDP deflator, which is based substantially on the official (and falsely low) rate of inflation, and which is used to calculate real GDP, was obviously far too low. This farce resulted in higher levels of real GDP than were warranted by the data, because inflation was not being properly taken into account.

This is how they covered up the destruction of our economy via free trade, globalization, off-shoring and outsourcing, along with both legal and illegal immigration (slave labor). If the true figures were used, our real GDP would show that the rate of growth in our economy has been virtually flat to negative since 1990. That means all the growth in our stock markets since the early 1990’s has been nothing but false puffery, which resulted from profligate growth in the supply of money and credit, and not from growth in production. For this reason, when the Dow finally bottoms, we expect it to track back to its levels during the early 1990’s, which means roughly 2,500 to 3,500. That level will destroy everything, especially the wealth of our middle class, but the elitists themselves are going to take it on the chin. They are afraid the system will implode before they can bail, and that they will go down with the ship also. We wholeheartedly confirm their fears.

SINCE HYPERINFLATION IS CLEARLY in our future, let’s talk about what inflation really is, what causes it, what the different degrees or levels of inflation are, and what it takes to put a stop to inflation?

By modern definitions, inflation is basically an overall increase in the prices charged for goods and services in a particular economy over time. This is a pretty simple concept, but there is some real confusion as to what the root cause of inflation is. It does not come from people willy-nilly charging more for their goods and services. People can raise prices all they like, but if there is not enough money and credit available to purchase their goods and services at the prices they are charging, they will eventually have to either lower their prices, or expect to make far fewer sales.

What you have witnessed for the past two years is the above concept in overdrive, especially in the real estate and automobile markets, as the supply of money and credit has greatly contracted for all but the anointed Illuminist institutions that are parking their profits and bailout money at interest with the Fed for fear that they might lend it out to a zombie financial institution or business corporation and never get it back. As their money is sidelined with the Fed to sterilize it (i.e. to keep it from stoking inflation) the smaller fry who depend on them for their supply of financial capital are being allowed to die of money and credit starvation so the anointed can purchase the most valuable parts of their financial carcasses at pennies on the dollar via bankruptcy auctions and fire-sales in a blatant attempt to eliminate their competition and consolidate their power.

This deflationary contraction in the supply of money and credit due to the exposed loan, mortgage and derivative fraud is a strong undertow to our economy which threatens to drag it out to sea until it runs out of air and drowns. The Fed must therefore inflate and swim for shore, or die. And inflate they will. We can absolutely guarantee it. Obama will go down in history as the King of Stagflation, as he joins forces with the inimitable Gordon Brown, the King of Fire-Sale Gold.